Three Dimensions of Hospital Performance (Part 2: Relationships)

by Raf Cammarano, 26 April 2018

Part 1 of this series, explained the three dimensions of hospital performance: quality, access and price. This post covers the relationships between them.

It is tempting to try and maximise performance along all three dimensions simultaneously: improve quality, improve access and reduce prices (or costs). However, a hospital is a "system" and maximising performance of one part of the system does not necessarily result in maximum performance overall. The following diagram shows that a change to one dimension has consequences for the other dimensions.

It is management's job to agree on what "high performance" looks like for their hospital. Different hospitals will have different priorities. In making these trade-offs, management will implicitly be acknowledging that performance metrics for some parts of the hospital are allowed to be sub-optimal, in order to maximise performance of the hospital overall. Other posts in this series:

Raf Cammarano

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Three Dimensions of Hospital Performance (Part 3: KPIs)

Published on 26 April 2018

The data in a Hospital Information System (HIS) plays a central role in generating the KPIs for these three dimensions. A hospital will have other systems, most notably Finance and HR, which also contain valuable KPI data.

Three Dimensions of Hospital Performance (Part 1)

Published on 19 April 2018

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